Now I Can Stop Thinking About Korean History, Because I’ve Got It All Figured Out

Because I have come up with a metaphor that’s so simplistic and attractive to me that it is guaranteed to color my views of everything I learn from here on out about the Choson period.

Here’s the  story:  I’m a regular guy, insofar as I like to come up with simplistic ways of understanding huge, complex issues about which I know little.  In fact, this urge to fool myself into believing I understand that which I do not is so strong that when I manage to find a metaphor, slogan or glib phrase that sums up an understanding of something that’s catchy enough and makes enough sense on the surface, I find myself unable to think outside this box.

(I would say, as a sidebar, that the most commonly heard glib slogan thrown around when talking about Korea is ‘Neo-Confucianism’.  Whenever you hear anybody talking about the effects or influences of ‘Neo-Confucianism’ on modern Korea it is safe to assume that they don’t know what they are talking about.)

I’ve been reading several books on Korean history for the Seminar in Korean History course I’m taking at Yonsei.  Although I am familiar with the broad outline of the history of Korea, my knowledge is relatively shallow.  Thus the stage is set for an overly simplistic metaphor to sweep in and impose itself on my view of Korean history.

One of the central questions of Korean history is ‘Was the Choson state stagnant?’  This question is important because the first modern historians who looked at Korea, who were Japanese, claimed that Choson was stagnant and that that fact justified their annexation of Korea in the early 20th century.  How does one answer the question of whether Choson was stagnant without much actual knowledge about the period or even a clear idea of what is meant by the word ‘stagnant’ in this context?  The only answer is to use the perfect metaphor.

My classmates suggested several good metaphors that seemed to cover almost everything.  I suggested a spinning top, a lotto machine, one of those cheese graters with the four faces that have different grating surfaces on each face, and a game of volleyball.  I think the best one suggested overall was that of ‘percolation’ rather than progress.  That one explained the bounded social mobility of the Choson period handily, but it failed to explain who Choson failed to modernize with the speed with which Japan did so.

Japan, of course, underwent a series of destabilizing structural changes and a series of different state structures, and various competing parties welcomed a certain degree of modernization in their own interests while Choson appears to most historians to be relatively resistant to change.  I struck upon the idea that perhaps Choson’s ultimate failure actually lies in its striking on a stable, ‘good enough’ structure relatively early.  And then the greatest metaphor ever occurred to me.

The Choson dynasty is ActiveX.

Think about it: Choson established a stable government and social system relatively early on which, regardless of its flaws and merits, did such an adequate job of satisfying most people’s needs that the costs of replacing, overthrowing or improving upon it outweighed the perceived benefits.  People simply worked inside the system, which was good enough not to make any one group both angry enough and powerful enough to pose a threat to its continuing existence.

The Korean government imposed ActiveX as the standard.  It works alright with Internet Explorer.  It’s not secure, but it seems secure enough.  It resists change because it works alright, and more importantly it suits the Financial Supervisory Service and politicians more than it harms online retailers and internet users, who are doing alright despite it.

And that’s the lesson here.  When things are alright, they’re not great.  When things are good enough, there is little incentive to make them better.  Dissatisfaction, the harder to satisfy the better, is what pushes things forward. 

(Watch me pull it all back around now.)

The great flaw of Neo-Confucian statecraft is that it works.  When every meaningful element of society is either satisfied or weakened to the point where its satisfaction is irrelevant, there is no motivating drive on the whole.  The Choson period was full of people striving to improve their own lot in life, and the net effect of it was a whole lot of nothing, not because of a lack of talent, skill or will, but because of a surplus of means of satisfying ambitions which were in the end pretty pointless.  My professor quotes Korean historian Ed Wagner as saying that one thing that never ceases to amaze is the propensity of Koreans to develop means of displaying status, whether it be education, scholarship (not the same thing), luxury goods, real estate, plastic surgery, and on and on.  The problem, as I see it, is that the surfeit of means of satisfying ambitions which were, in the end, essentially worthless leaves a society with nothing but a bunch of accomplished failures.

It also occurs to me that modern Korea may be alright, because a lot of the things that have become modern status symbols, (industry and technology, for example) have a much stronger element of progress than past status symbols like Confucian scholarship, which appears to have been a 500 year dead end and a drain of the best minds on the peninsula.

Putting The Lie To Civilization

Korea Old and New: A History, p.129:

Ceramics occupied a special place in Yi dynasty art. In the early period pieces called punch’ong (“powder blue-green”) were produced, like Koryo celadon only with a glaze that had devolved toward an ashy blue-green tone.  This was a transition stage leading to the making of white porcelain (paekcha), a genre that departed from the smoothly curved shapes of Koryo celadon in favor of simpler, warmer lines.  These creations also stood on broader bases, resulting in more practical vessels that give the viewer a sense of sturdy repose.  This Yi dynasty ceramic ware, with its varying shadings of white ranging from pure white to milky to grayish hues, is said to constitute a fitting expression of the character of the yangban literati.

Seriously?

Nowhere but in the world of the antique is it more obvious that many of the things that we, as societies and individuals hold dear, are completely arbitrary.  I read the above passage, head buzzing with a single thought: How many writers removed are the above sentiments from actual knowledge about ceramics.  I think it’s a safe assumption that the many authors of Korea Old and New necessarily know more about Korean history than they do about ceramics, and yet here they are repeating that it ceramic ware of the period ‘is said to consitute a fitting expression of the character of the yangban literati’.  What does this mean, exactly?  The things that they held dear reflect the desires and values that they held?  Really, are you sure?  Furthermore, the slavish description of the varied hues of white in Choson porcelain indicates that this unevenness is something to be desired.  Why?  The only reason that we know that uneven whiteness was something to be desired is because that’s what the people who wanted fine porcelain ended up getting.

Why do we eat T-bone steaks?  Is it because it has a bone in it that is shaped like a T?  If one were to look back on this era and read about a T-bone steak, and in recalling that fine cut of meat they were to lavish attention on the imagery of the meat trisected by a widget of bone, and to attempt to describe the decision to order a T-bone in terms of the mind of the eater, would we accept the argument that the presence of the bone in the meat reflects the innermost essence of the minds of the times?  Perhaps.  But perhaps we would not.

And likewise, when we look at a surviving piece of ceramic ware from the Choson period, and we make ourselves aware of the standards by which the people of the period judged good pottery from bad, how deep should we go?  How much of the continued evolution of pottery from Koryo through the Choson period had anything to do with changing taste itself, and how much of it had to do with the unadorned desire for something new and rare?  Were the styles of the 1980s in any sense better than those of the 1970s?  Did they say something about the minds of the people of the period?  Undoubtedly they did.  Were they ‘a fitting expression of the character’ of the 1980s westerner?  I leave it to you to judge.

What I find most objectionable about passages like the above is that, yes, clearly the yangban of that period saw something in those ceramic designs that appealed to them on a deep level.  But to what extent do the writers of the present understand what it was about the pieces that moved the yangban?  How much of the appeal was aesthetic, and how much of it was simply the appeal of rarity?  People these days will pay more for a 100 year-old mint condition penny, a mass-produced piece of currency, than reason might dictate.  To what extent was this simple motivation to own something rare (and thus valuable) merely for its flawlessness motivating the ceramic collector of the Choson period?

 

Gaudiness

Just A Juxtaposition

From Homer’s Odyssey, Book XVIII:

And when Antinous saw this he was glad, and said: "This is thegoodliest sport that I have seen in this house. These two beggarswould fight; let us haste and match them."And the saying pleased them; and Antinous spake again: "Hear me,ye suitors of the Queen! We have put aside these paunches of thegoats for our supper. Let us agree, then, that whosoever of thesetwo shall prevail, shall have choice of these, that which pleasethhim best, and shall hereafter eat with us, and that no one elseshall sit in his place."

From the creators of Bum Fights:

"Society has a fascination with homeless people, people living on the streets, almost a perverse fascination," Laticia said. "People don’t get a chance to see much of that. We thought it would be exciting to get a glimpse of that kind of life."

Yangbans ‘N’ Things

Here’s a quote from Korea Old And New: A History, p. 108:

The sole duty of a yangban was to devote themselves exclusively to the study and self-cultivation that Confucian doctrine holds must underlie the governing of others, and their sole profession was the holding of public office.  Yet they did not serve in the technical posts as medical officers, translator-interpreters,  astronomer-astrologers, accountants, statute law clerks, scribes or government artists, all of which became the virtually hereditary preserve of the chungin (“middle people”) class.  Nor did the yangban perform routine duties of petty clerks and local civil functionaries or of cadre members.  They also were not interested in working in agriculture, manufacture, or commerce, for these were but the occupations of farmers, artisans, and merchants.  Their role instead was to fashion an ideal Confucian polity through the moral cultivation of Choson’s people.

Now the reason I bring this up is because it occurs to me that this impulse to oversee without doing is alive and well in our own culture.  In fact, if you go to any medium-quality management school you are likely to meet any number of people whose ambition in life it is to manage without being able to do.  They’re willing to learn just enough to perhaps hold their own when being reported to, but in fact that’s all they’re comfortable learning.  I have talked to a number of confused youths whose ambition it is in life to ‘be a manager’, without any real understanding of how that happens or what it means.  With the exception of a relatively small core of elite junior executives and lucky shmoes, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in the real world it’s the rare person who becomes a manager without learning to do something practical.

Nonetheless the dream lives on, to go ‘learn management’ and ‘become a manager’.  Now the major difference between the folks we’ve got running around these days and the yangban were that the yangban actually had a shot at the dream.  Our yangban are just fooling themselves.

지붕뚫고 하이킥 And Class (part 2 of 2)

See part 1

I have to say a word here about Jihun, because I found his character extremely interesting.  He is a blank, a difficult to read figure that other people try and fail to understand.  He buys Segyeong a number of gifts, but it is usually implied that he does it out of concern for her extreme poverty rather than with any romantic intention.  When Jeongeum falls asleep in his car he ends up driving her all the way to the East Sea, and she is unable to determine whether he did this on purpose so they could spend time together (he didn’t).  My reaction watching the show was that he was either incredibly insensitive or an incredible tease.  With both girls he would behave in a way that indicated he was interested (e.g. taking Jeongeum out in honor of the first snowfall) and then suddenly and pointedly remark that it was just a coincidence that they happened to be together at that time, or in some other way burst one or both of the girls’ bubbles.  Thinking about it now, it seems likely to me that this was the writer’s intention: he, a rich handsome doctor, was never actually interested in either girl, and he ended up with Jeongeum only after she misread him as interested enough to pursue him.  This would fit in with my overall reading of the show.

Junhyeok, the high school student son, likes Segyeong, the gorgeous housekeeper.  Their relationship centers around his privilege as a student and her inability to go to school.  In a few episodes Segyeong does go to school and gets a taste for what it’s like to be a normal child unburdened by the responsibility of supporting a younger sibling.  She ends up studying as a result of these encounters.  Junhyeok appears to a moderate student (I may be wrong, because I don’t find him to be particularly interesting so I didn’t really pay attention to his stories that much), but Segyeong’s inability to study makes his unwillingness to study look particularly bad.  In the penultimate episode they share a single kiss, which Segyeong appears to give him because she’s leaving forever.  She tells him in the final episode to never mention it again, never think about it, study hard and go to a good school.  It feels like the kiss meant a lot more to him than it did to her, a parting shot, we could say, rather than a meaningful connection between them.  Presumably it was also intended to do what Segyeong said, to make Junhyeok stop daydreaming and get on with his privileged, should-be happy life.

Both Segyeong and Shinae refuse gifts from the rich family, which I think is significant. Jihun the doctor repeatedly buys things for Segyeong the housekeeper, we are led to believe because she is so poor and he is so wealthy.  In a key episode he gives her a phone that he won in a raffle.  The next month he pays her phone bill, and she attempts to pay him back, but he returns the money, explaining that he won’t accept it and that the phone bill was a gift.  Segyeong refuses the gift by knitting him a scarf.  In the end of the episode, Jihun takes Segyeong out to a street market in a scene that would be familiar to any drama watcher as romantic.  Rather than being romantic, however, Jihun does the math.  The phone bill was for 23,000 won, the yarn cost 10,000 won and Segyong’s time was worth about $40,000 won, so he actually owes Segyeong the difference of 27,000 won.  He haggles with the scarf lady to buy Segyeong a red scarf at exactly 27,000 and declares the two even.  In the final episode Segyeong finds an envelope full of money in her suitcase and, assuming correctly that it’s from Jihun, puts it in his desk.  Shinae does the same.  A distraught Haeri, finally breaking away from her ‘Shinae is mine!’ ranting, tells Shinae to choose any three of her dolls to take with her, but Shinae refuses.  Haeri forces her to take her two favorites, but when Haeri returns home from school after Shinae’s left for the airport she finds the two dolls with a note from Shinae saying that she couldn’t possibly take them. Haeri’s reaction is one of anguish.  She wanted to give something to Shinae, but Shinae would take nothing from her.  The two girls pay their debts and except neither charity nor, apparently, gifts.

Finally I have to talk about the ending of the series.  Segyeong, Shinae and their now-reunited father are on their way to the airport in the pouring rain.  Segyeong doesn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to Jihun, who has been at work all night.  She goes to his office and waits, eventually sending Shinae and the father ahead so that she can wait for him.  She obviously really wants to see him, right?  She finally leaves a not and prepares to go when he arrives.  He was on his way out, to meet Hwang Jeongeum in Daejeon and presumably tell her that he wants to be with her even though she has no money.  He offers Segyeong a ride which she reluctantly accepts when he says he’s on his way out of Seoul anyway.  Segyeong correctly guesses that he’s on his way to see Jeongeum, and the two talk in a scene that is filmed in a car in the pouring rain with sound quality so bad you can barely tell what they’re saying.  She talks while he stares intently at the road, not saying much of anything.  She says that she was reluctant to leave Korea, and he asks why.  She says a couple of reasons, and then finally says that she didn’t want to leave because of him.  He stares at the road.  Then she says she’s finally happy because she’s with him, and she says she wishes she could be happy like that forever.  He says ‘what’ and she repeats that she wishes she could be happy like that forever.  He takes his eyes off the road and looks at her, and freeze frame.

This is the unspoken noble lie of the Korean drama.  Love conquers all, but it’s messy and painful and people will fight against your love.  There was a recent drama that I watched a bit of about the scion of a wealthy family who married his older brother’s secretary.  There was another one recently where seemingly everyone in a rich man’s family fell in love with a doorman’s children.  This is standard stuff.  Here though, that story wasn’t even allowed to happen.  It seems to have never occurred to Jihun that the poor housekeeper might like him.  I’m ignoring the age difference, which I understand to be substantial.  Segyeong liked Jihun but never did anything about it because she was poor and humble and not the kind of girl to go around telling people her feelings.  Jihun never really even considered Segyeong as anything other than a needy 동생 at best.  No magic love conquering all.  Love wasn’t even reciprocated.  Jihun just wordlessly stared at Segyeong, never indicating his own feelings or whether he even had any.  This is the kind of thing that you don’t really expect to see on even the best drama, and here they did it on a sitcom.

지분뚫고 하이킥 And Class (part 1 of 2)

After I put up my video reaction to the finale of 지붕뚫고 하이킥 I had a chance to watch some of the earliest episodes of the show because yesterday was 하이킥 day on whatever cable channel it is that shows reruns.  I was struck by the trajectory that the show took from first to last episode enough that I found I have a lot to say about the show and what I think it all means.. 

First of all, here’s an overview of the show, with ample help from the 하이킥 Wikipedia page.  Lee Sunjae owns a medium sized foods company, where his daughter Hyeongyeong’s husband Boseok works.  Hyeongyeong is a teacher and a raging bitch.  Sunjae is desperate to impress people, and Boseok is constantly disappointing and angering his father-in-law/boss.  Hyeongyeong and Boseok’s teenage son Junhyeok is a high school student.  Their daughter Haeri is a terrible, cruel, selfish little girl.  Pointedly, nobody in the family really punishes or reprimands Haeri for her rude and selfish acts.  More typically they deal with her by either placating or ignoring her.

Sunjae’s son Jihun is a successful doctor who went to Seoul National University.  He is an icy mystery.  In a way he’s a subversion of the classic Korean drama perfect man: he’s stoic, successful, handsome and rich, but while he’s charming, he’s also frustratingly inert, and none of the female love interests in the show ever really has a firm grasp on what his feelings or intentions are.

Into their house come the sisters Segyeong and Shinae.  In the first episode, they’ve followed their father into the Taebaek Mountains on the run from loan sharks.  The loan sharks find him, and the girls are split up from their father and end up in Seoul, where Segyeong finds work as the family housekeeper.  Shinae begins attending school with Haeri, who consistently and thoroughly makes her life a living hell with her twin catch phrases 내꺼야! (“It’s mine!”) and 빵꾸똥꾸야! (lit. “Hey you farting asshole!”).  There is also Hwang Jeongeum, who comes into the house as Junhyeok’s private lesson teacher under the mistaken belief that she is a student at Seoul National University (she is actually studying at Seoun University (perhaps we could translate this as ‘Regrettable University’).  She lives at a boarding house run by Lee Sunjae’s girlfriend Jaok.

The power relationship between the rich family and the girls that serve them (housekeeper Segyeong and tutor Jeongeum) underlies all of the interactions in the show in a number of interesting ways.  There is a recurring reference to Boseok’s frustration at living in Sunjae’s house and working for him.  In one episode he attempts to relieve the stress sustained from his Sunjae by berating his driver, which backfires when the driver attempts to beat him up.  He takes up rapping about his father-in-law as an outlet for his anger.  But repeatedly he takes out his frustration on Segyeong.  On a number of occasions we see usually mild-mannered Boseok yelling at Segyeong, usually because she followed the instructions of another member of the house rather than him.  It’s disconcerting to see this power imbalance pointedly brought up in the middle of what is supposedly a light, fun show for families, and it’s never not a little scary.

Always scary is Boseok’s wife Lee Hyeongyeong, played by former Miss Korea Oh Hyeongyeong.  Two years ago in this blog I called her ’sort of boring’ (I also called her Oh Hyun-jung, so take that for what you will), but she is much more frustrating than boring on this show.  She is the character most responsible for enforcing the power distance between servants and served on the show.  In one memorable instance she cancelled Segyeong’s day off (picking her up at the bus stop on her way out) so that Segyeong could cook for her.  She accepts this as a matter of course.  She is also the one who fires Hwang Jeongeum without mercy when it is discovered that she doesn’t go to Seoul National University.  To her these things are unquestionable, and the fact that Segyeong and Jeongeum are employees supersedes any emotional relationship that might develop between them.

Her daughter Haeri is established as the spoiled brat of the show from the beginning, with Segyeong’s younger sister Shinae as her constant victim.  She points out repeatedly that Segyeong is the housekeeper and Shinae is nothing but a freeloader.  Any meager possession that Shinae gets is either stolen or destroyed by Haeri, usually with vengeful glee.  None of the adults in the family expresses much interest in correcting her behavior, with the possible exception of her older brother Junhyeok, whose motives are suspect.  In the end of the series, during which Segyeong and Shinae are reunited with their father and plan to leave the country, Haeri does an abrupt turnaround and decides that Shinae is ‘hers’.  Just like a toy that Haeri is too selfish to let go of, she refuses to let Shinae go, not because they are friends but because Shinae is her punching bag.  She even goes so far as tethering Shinae to her, which is played for laughs but is fairly disturbing at the same time.  Shinae accepts all of this passively, having precious little say over her life as it is.  Shinae is presented throughout the show as either a pawn or a plot point, without much to do other than be harmed by Haeri and protected by Segyeong.

Hwang Jeongum, the tutor, has a similarly fraught relationship with the family.  Initially hated by her student Junhyeok, he begrudgingly accepts her, although my impression is that he accepts her because she doesn’t make him study much.  According to Wikipedia she became a tutor to repay a debt, and she’s not a very good tutor.  In the beginning of the series Jeongeum is a spoiled girl from Daejeon (I think) who has come up to Seoul and for the first time in her life is forced to be responsible for herself.  In one memorable episode she borrows money from Segyeong (who is effectively destitute).  Segyeong is forced to take drastic measures when she discovers that Jeongeum always borrows money from people without repaying them.  Eventually Jeongeum and the handsome doctor Jihun start dating.  Their relationship takes a turn, however, when her father cuts her off (I believe he goes bankrupt?) and she is forced to work a series of increasingly demeaning part-time jobs to pay for her lifestyle.  She skips date after date because of work, and finally she breaks up with him when he sees her working as a dancing soju bottle on the street.  Although he is fine, she is unable to bear the shame of dating someone so well-off while she is struggling so much.  In the final episode she returns to Daejeon, and he is on his way to see her there, presumably to get her back, when he runs into Segyeong and they take their final ride.

In Defense of the Final Episode of 지붕뚫고 하이킥

Below is a video I made on my way to buy lunch about my reaction to the series finale of the melodramatic sitcom 지붕뚫고 하이킥 (Highkick Through the Roof).  Here is part 1 of the episode, and you can find your way through to the end if you care to. 

The show actually did something that I long ago wished I could see in a Korean drama: the central romance between a successful guy from a rich family and a pure, sweet girl of humble origins never even happened.

I’m not a big fan of video blogging, but I wanted to get this up while it was fresh.  The more I think about it, though, the more I think it was a really great ending to the show, so I may return to this in a little more depth.

Critique of Between Dreams And Reality: The Military Examination in Late Choson Korea, 1600-1894

Below is a critique I’ve just written on Eugene Park’s Between Dreams And Reality: The Military Examination in Late Choson Korea, 1600-1894 that I’ve written for my Seminar in Korean History class.   Comments are welcome.

Eugene Park’s Between Dreams and Reality does a serviceable job of presenting the findings of Park’s research into the rosters of military examination passers from different periods in the Choson state, as well as presenting a general overview of the scholarship done to date on the Choson-era examination systems. Where Park fails is in his conclusion, in which he abruptly presents theories and ideas which bear little relation to the rest of the book and which he is unable to convincingly link to his findings. More grievously, one of Park’s central arguments is both flawed and completely unsupported.

Vicarious Leisure

I was having an interesting conversation yesterday with a friend while discussing the proposition of finding someone from among the foreigners we know in Korea to fill an open position at my company.  As we went over the various people we know, evaluating their Korean language skills, other qualifications, where they are in their careers and whether they would be interested in a job in the field in question, we managed to narrow down the field to a small number of individuals, and yet with seemingly all the appropriate candidates we repeatedly found the same problem.  None of those most suited to the job appeared to be particularly motivated to start careers.  In most cases, the people we dismissed for this reason were currently occupied as dabblers.  They came to Korea without any particular aim, and although they may have learned Korean here or known it already, for the most part they learned it without any particular career goal in mind.  A few of the most qualified candidates were not interested in working at all, while others among them were not ready to decide what field they wanted to enter.  I should mention that the people we were discussing are all current students at or recent graduates of Yonsei GSIS, and the many of the ones who came up in our discussion were concentrating in trade and finance or management.

We were having a hard time explaining why this would be.  Why would so many people who had taken their education to this level nonetheless be unprepared to begin their careers?  What are they studying for, if not to help their job prospects?

I brought up, as I often do, leisure studies.  Here’s an abridged excerpt from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class that I’d had in mind:

The great, pervading human relation in such a system is that of master and servant.  The accepted evidence of wealth is the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves [i.e. servants] engaged in attendance of their master’s person and in producing goods for him. . . At the same time those servants whose office is personal service, including  domestic duties, come gradually to be exempted from productive industry carried on for gain. . . This process of progressive exemption from the common run of industrial employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the wife, or the chief wife. . . By virtue of their serving as evidence of the ability to pay, the office of such domestics regularly tends to include continually fewer duties, and their service tends in the end to become nominal only. . . [T]here arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure class. . . his leisure normally passes under the guise of specialized service directed to the furtherance of the master’s fullness of life.

Compare this to a recent entry in the Stuff White People Like blog on picking fruit:

Many of you might be familiar with the process of harvesting a crop, some of its more intense variations are often referred to as “migrant labor” and “slavery.” Under these conditions, laborers are expected to work extremely hard in order to live up to large expectations about their fruit picking output.

When white people harvests a crop it’s known as “berry picking” or “pick your own fruit.”  Under these conditions, white people are expected to work leisurely with no real expectations and then they pay for the privilege to do so. In other words, berry picking is the agricultural equivalent to a private liberal arts college. It’s no surprise white people like it, because much like a liberal arts degree it feels like you’ve done real work when you really haven’t.

Based on the same line of reasoning, I argued to my friend that those students that we know who have no intention of finding gainful employment in the near future and particularly those who lack even an idea about how to do so should be viewed as luxury accessories (derivative leisure class) of their parents (legitimate leisure class).  In this way, I would say that raising one’s children in the suburbs, away from where gainful employment is performed and money is actually made, often turns the sheltered suburban child into a human status marker for the parent.  Among US baby boomers in particular, where there sometimes seems to be a marked lack of concern for one’s children’s economic success, and any higher education is anachronistically viewed as a gateway to one or another form of success, this appears to be the rule rather than the exception.

Of course this doesn’t hold true in every case, but then again if it did you’d probably already have noticed it and I wouldn’t need to write this, would I?

Just A Juxtaposition For You

From Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyongnae Rebellion of 1812, p93:

Whenever a natural disaster hit the country or a political power struggle caused chaos in society, some officials and geomancers argued that the terrestrial forces of Kaesong were exhausted and that transfer of the capital to P’yongyang was needed.  Many kings, subscribing to these arguments, rebuilt and expanded P’yongyang and made royal visit to the city to obtain the terrestrial benefits it held.

From a Jan 11 press release by Prime Minister Chung Un-Chan:

Prime Minister Chung Un-Chan announced the Master Plan for the Development of Sejong City today, following two months of discussions by the Joint Committee comprised of specialists and officials from both the public and private sector.

Notably, the blueprint aims at fostering the city as a viable center for new growth engines encompassing various universities, research centers and businesses. To this end, the city will proactively attract many leading corporations as well as prestigious academic institutes to transform the area into an international science and business belt.